Ravis.network

Since its construction in 1889, more than 250 million people have visited Paris’ iconic Eiffel Tower. The highest monument in the world for more than 40 years (today that title is held by Burj Khalifa in Dubai), the Eiffel Tower remains the most visited monument globally. But not everyone has been or can hope to go—until now. If you’ve ever wondered what the view is like from above the City of Light or wanted to learn more about the Tower’s history, now’s your chance to find out.

The Google Cultural Institute and the Eiffel Tower Operating Company have teamed up to create three immersive online exhibitions which blend fascinating historical material with a sprinkling of technological magic. In order to capture the imagery, the Street View team followed in the footsteps of 7 million annual visitors and ascended multiple floors of the Tower. Using the Street View Trolley (designed especially for monuments and museums) they filmed 360-degree views of the monument’s architecture and its views over Paris.

These modern-day Street View panoramas sit alongside nearly 50 archival images, plans, engravings and photos telling the story of the Eiffel Tower’s development and social impact in the 19th century. Some of the archive material is quite rare and precious such as a recording of Gustave Eiffel’s voice by Thomas Edison.

The first exhibition presents the birth of the Eiffel Tower from the initial idea until its realization. You can then follow the construction of the monument step-by-step through photos and sketches. Details on the inauguration and the first visitors lie in the third exhibition, with photos of people admiring the Paris vista on the opening day leading into today’s Street View imagery from the top floor. Did you know that during the Tower’s inauguration for the Universal Exhibition of 1889, the elevators were not yet in service but 12,000 people per day rushed to climb the 1710 steps leading to the top?


As a product manager and designer, it’s been awe-inspiring to get to see the spectacular vision and the detailed architectural capabilities exemplified by the plans more than 100 years ago. It required tremendous knowledge of special planning and physics to ensure that 18,000 separately made pieces would come together as one. So if you’ve never visited the Eiffel Tower before, want to get insider knowledge or simply want to re-discover it in a new way, visit our site and immerse yourself in one of the most well-known attractions on the planet.

Posted by Mark Yoshitake, Head of Product & User Experience, Google Cultural Institute

I once read a quote about India attributed to Winston Churchill. 

Maybe the quote is apocryphal and I wonder whether he really said this, but at one point of time Winston Churchill was against granting independence to India so it is possible that he probably made this statement which is attributed to him:

Power will go to the hands of rascals, rogues and freebooters. 
All Indian leaders will be of low calibre and men of straw. 
They will have sweet tongues and silly hearts. 
They will fight amongst themselves for power and India will be lost in political squabbles. 
A day would come when even air and water would be taxed.

Winston Churchill made this prophecy about India almost 70 years ago. 
I wonder whether his predictions are really coming true. 
I feel sad, helpless, as there is nothing I can do about it, but watch on haplessly. 

Some statistics around social media penetration in India caught our attention. Our attempt will be to make sense of these figures from various reports and understand if these are indicating a positive trend for marketers.

We Are Social reported that active social media penetration in India is 5%. This is well below the global average of 23%. The report also observed that there is a drop in penetration across mature markets, but on-going growth in markets like India. Look at the chart below for a global view of active social media penetration.

A quick look at the chart below indicates that there are 63 million active users of Facebook in India.

What really interested us was the report by Internet & Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) which suggested that social media was fast penetrating into the smaller towns of India. According to this, out of the 62 million (as opposed to 63 million stated by We are Social and 61 million stated by SocialBakers) active urban social media users, 24% belong to small towns (population less than two lakh) while another 11% are from towns that have populations between 2 and 5 lakhs. Essentially, more than a third i.e. about 35% of the urban social networking base is from small towns having populations of upto 5 lakhs. This is an important statistic to note for marketers.

A further breakup states that 35% of the social networking base is in towns with a population up to five lakh and of this, towns with population lesser than two lakh account for 24% or a quarter of the users.

“Quite clearly, although there is growth in terms of absolute number of individuals in each of the town classes, the smaller towns are exhibiting faster growth, thereby contributing more to the overall proportion of social media users in urban India.” – Subho Ray, president, IAMAI.

“Apart from social networking, professional networking has been engaging the users. Professional networking sites are more popular among young females and have the second highest average time spent. It is also anticipated that the rate of growth in mobile usage will exceed the growth in usage through personal computers for the foreseeable future.” – Yogesh Bansal, founder and CEO, ApnaCircle.com.